Desire, lack, value or need can trigger the impulse to posses, buy or steal. Why do we desire things at all? Why do we value some objects more than others? How do objects of desire come into being? Where does desire begin and where does the allure of a product end? What came first, the wish, or the object of the wish? And where am I positioned among these things? Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari state that we are never alone in our desire, and in our desire we are not simply needy for one thing, but instead desire is developed collectively. Desire and subject are interwoven, they are dependent on each other. Needs, valuations and objects are developed within heterogenous structures. These processes and their inherent power relationships are hard to conceive of, they cannot easily be described or represented. Yet, in her art Jen Liu consistently engages visually and conceptually with these intricate relationships between desire and subjectivity.

The presented works from the „Pink Detatchment“ project consist of a film and a series of watercolor paintings. Part of Jen Liu’s most recent output, they demonstrate the artist’s intense engagement with these complex topics.
A dominant element of the paintings is what appears to be a female index finger, pointing and pressing in all directions. It symbolizes the complexities of the production systems and the distribution of power. At the same time, it represents, as Jen Liu points out, a vision of the future. For, when we remind ourselves that also in Asian countries, economic rationalization policies increasingly employ female workforces, these images are visions of the outcome of today’s economic and politic control mechanisms.

Liu’s interest in the power relations of the production process is already conveyed in the film’s a technical aspect, when she simultaneously applies different visual techniques. The film alternates between the immateriality of the digital realm, the physicality of everyday objects, as well as the phantasmagoric merging of basic geometrical 3D forms with the human body. Conceptually, the film refers to the Chinese propaganda-ballet “The Red Detachment of Women” made during China’s Cultural Revolution. This ballet depicts a woman who joins a women’s squad of the Red Army at Hainan island. The choice of this reference is not only guided by historic interest, but mainly serves to reflect on the current situation of female workers of the Republic of China. The setting of a pig meat factory serves as metaphor for the intertwined processes of (re)production of national identity, class affiliation and gender. Here, these prove to be historic fictions, which came out of a chain of uniforming production steps.

The film is based on a thought experiment which proposes to view the present as a straightforward continuation of the past, disregarding any discontinuations: are today’s economic ideologies extensions of past fantasies, desires and needs? This theoretical train of thought is taken up by Liu in a visual experiment. She cites the music and choreography of “The Red Detachment of Women” ballet. How much of the old ideals and goals remain intact in the recreated imagery? How much of the past remains alive in a quote? The ballet is not simply remade however, its color tone, protagonists, ending and end result are changed fully: “Pink Detachment” is no remake, not a re-enactment but rather a deconstructed “de-enactment,” a performative intervention by the artist, in which she rearranges the highly charged archive material, probing the possibility of re-infusing such material with new political meaning.

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